The Impacts of an Early Mathematics Curriculum on Oral Language and Literacy

Competence  in early mathematics is crucial for later school success. Although research indicates that early  mathematics curricula  improve children's mathematics skill, such curricula's impacts on oral language and early literacy skills are not known. This project is the first to investigate the effects of an intensive pre-kindergarten mathematics curriculum,  Building Blocks , on the oral language and letter recognition of children participating in a large-scale cluster randomized trial project. Results showed no evidence that children who were taught mathematics using the curriculum performed differently than control children who received the typical district  mathematics instruction  on measures of letter recognition, and on two of the oral language (story retell) subtests, sentence length and  inferential reasoning  (emotive content). However, children in the  Building Blocks  group outperformed children in the control group on four oral language subtests: ability to recall key words, use of complex utterances, willingness to reproduce narratives independently, and inferential reasoning (practical content).